It has been a very eventful year for us, with some highs and very low lows. We flew to the UK in January for a quick visit in order to attend the wedding of one of my university friends, Roz Harvey who married one Alan Sermons. The wedding took place at a small church in Hemel Hempstead. It was great to see the people there, some of whom I hadn’t spoken to in about 12 years.
I also decided to resign and leave my job of 12 years at BAC to pursue an opportunity made available to me to become my own boss. It was something that I felt that I was unable to give up and so I left BAC on 15th February. It took a couple of months to set things up and get established, but I am now able to keep a steady flow of work in and out, with quite a few major projects on the horizon.
In mid-February, we added a little dog to our menagerie, a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel named Deaglan Balthazaar. He was a happy little fellow, always wagging his tail and loved everyone he met. Unfortunately, after we had had him for about three weeks, he started to show signs of disorientation and confusion. He was diagnosed with a porto-systemic shunt of the liver, but despite many visits to the vet we were unable to fix him as the problem was found to be untreatable during exploratory surgery. We also lost Loreley to an attack, we think from a feral cat in the area a week before Deaglan, so it was a very sad time for us both.
We have recovered from our losses however, and have acquired another cat, who is all white this time, named Artemis Penelope, who like her first name implies is the goddess of hunting – anything and everything. Despite her rather rotund demeanour, she is very active. In October Bronwyn Anastacia arrived on British Airways from England, another Cavalier, and she is fitting very well into the family. She and Artemis spend many hours running around the house and garden. Mathias is well, but tends to be more sedate these days.
In April, a contingent from Bermuda travelled to Virginia to celebrate the 400th Anniversary of the colonisation of Jamestown (1607). The Bermuda Regiment Band and Bermuda Islands Pipe Band played for the Virginia International Tattoo in Norfolk. It was an exhausting visit with not a lot of down time and seven shows crammed into 4 days, with rehearsals for about 4 days before that, private engagements and the like. We rushed from one place to another and even changed uniforms part way through the show. Unfortunately, we never got to Jamestown.
Another trip to the UK in May for Brendan’s wedding to Suzie at a little church overlooking the North Sea in East Anglia. It was a rather chilly day with a NE breeze, but my father, Pete and myself still managed to wear Bermuda shorts as is customary. Brendan wasn’t so brave and settled for a more traditional English look. The day following, Marisa and I travelled to Dublin, Ireland and spent a week driving, bicycling and exploring Dublin and its environs. We drove up into Wicklow and Valleymount where my grandfather was from. It is a reservoir now of course, but the hill tops are probably quite similar. We also made contact with our Irish cousins and had dinner on our last evening with Dermot and his three children, Hugh, Alexandra and Rory at Thalius and Alexandra’s house. On our way back through London we met Roz and Alan for tea at the Savoy and saw Wicked for the second time.
The summer began and Marisa began rehearsals for Dreamgirls in July. The show opened in early October and I was tricked into becoming the crew boss. The stage manager was borrowed from the West End in London and did his utmost to make himself thoroughly unpopular with the crew. Unfortunately when you are working with volunteers you can’t treat them the way you do employees, and especially not in Bermuda. The show went very well and by the weekend of the first week was completely sold out.
In late September, we jetted off to Boston for our anniversary and had an enjoyable time seeing the sights and traveling around Marisa’s old post-graduate stomping ground. We even visited Babson College and met some of Marisa’s former colleagues in the Admin offices. For our anniversary evening, we took a gondola ride on the Charles River, complete with champagne and a basket of cheese and biscuits.
More recently, we travelled to New York to see the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes Christmas Show, which was absolutely fabulous and also a Chorus Line on Broadway. Fortunately, the stagehands strike was over. Marisa and I went ice skating at Bryant Park. Marisa did very well for her first time, in fact she looked like a pro at the end. I was still trying to find my balance. We also went for a walking photograph tour with a local guide who had us stand in the middle of the road in Times Square for photos, a walk through Central Park and on the Brooklyn Bridge, ending up at Rockerfeller Center.
All in all, it has been an eventful year. We have a general election coming up next week and then it’s full speed ahead into the Christmas and New Year season. We wish you all the very best for a Happy and prosperous 2008.
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